Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

This paper explores the effects of experiencing the death of a sibling on children's developmental outcomes. Recent work has shown that experiencing a sibling death is common and long-term effects are large. We extend understanding of these effects by estimating dynamic effects on surviving siblings' cognitive and socioemotional outcomes, as well as emotional and cognitive support by parents. Using the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (CNLSY79), we find large initial effects on cognitive and noncognitive outcomes that decline over time. We also provide evidence that the effects are larger if the surviving child is older and less prominent if the deceased child was either disabled or an infant, suggesting sensitive periods of exposure. Auxiliary results show that parental investments in the emotional support of surviving children decline following the death of their child.

Bibliography Citation

Fletcher, Jason, Marian Vidal-Fernández and Barbara L. Wolfe. "Dynamic and Heterogeneous Effects of Sibling Death on Children's Outcomes." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 115,1 (2 January 2018): 115-120.

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

We show that racial perceptions are fluid; how individuals perceive their own race and how they are perceived by others depends in part on their social position. Using longitudinal data from a representative sample of Americans, we find that individuals who are unemployed, incarcerated, or impoverished are more likely to be seen and identify as black and less likely to be seen and identify as white, regardless of how they were classified or identified previously. This is consistent with the view that race is not a fixed individual attribute, but rather a changeable marker of status.

Bibliography Citation

Penner, Andrew M. and Aliya Saperstein. "How Social Status Shapes Race." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105,50 (December 16, 2008): 19628-19630.

Examining the Effects of Birth Order on Personality
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112,46 (17 November 2015): 14224–14229.
Also: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/46/14224.abstract
Cohort(s):
NLSY97
Publisher:
National Academy of Sciences (NAS), United StatesKeyword(s):
Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB); Birth Order; Cross-national Analysis; German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP); Intelligence; NCDS - National Child Development Study (British); Personality/Big Five Factor Model or Traits; Siblings

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

This study examined the long-standing question of whether a person's position among siblings has a lasting impact on that person's life course. Empirical research on the relation between birth order and intelligence has convincingly documented that performances on psychometric intelligence tests decline slightly from firstborns to later-borns. By contrast, the search for birth-order effects on personality has not yet resulted in conclusive findings. We used data from three large national panels from the United States (n = 5,240), Great Britain (n = 4,489), and Germany (n = 10,457) to resolve this open research question. This database allowed us to identify even very small effects of birth order on personality with sufficiently high statistical power and to investigate whether effects emerge across different samples. We furthermore used two different analytical strategies by comparing siblings with different birth-order positions (i) within the same family (within-family design) and (ii) between different families (between-family design). In our analyses, we confirmed the expected birth-order effect on intelligence. We also observed a significant decline of a 10th of a SD in self-reported intellect with increasing birth-order position, and this effect persisted after controlling for objectively measured intelligence. Most important, however, we consistently found no birth-order effects on extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, or imagination. On the basis of the high statistical power and the consistent results across samples and analytical designs, we must conclude that birth order does not have a lasting effect on broad personality traits outside of the intellectual domain.

Bibliography Citation

Rohrer, Julie M., Boris Egloff and Stefan C. Schmukle. "Examining the Effects of Birth Order on Personality." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112,46 (17 November 2015): 14224–14229. A.